THE SILK-WEAVER.
When he arrived he made it his first business to find 'Widow Walker.' She was evidently one of the worst of her class; and could it have been accomplished without scandal, and without interfering with the quietness upon which he believed that the true effect of his labours in a large measure depended, he would not have scrupled simply to carry off the child.With much difficulty, for the woman was suspicious, he contrived to see her, and was at once reminded of the child he had seen in the cart on the occasion of Shargar's recognition of his mother.He fancied he saw in her some resemblance to his friend Shargar.The affair ended in his paying the woman a hundred and fifty pounds to give up the girl.Within six months she had drunk herself to death.He took little Nancy Kennedy home with him, and gave her in charge to his housekeeper.
She cried a good deal at first, and wanted to go back to Mother Walker, but he had no great trouble with her after a time.She began to take a share in the house-work, and at length to wait upon him.Then Falconer began to see that he must cultivate relations with other people in order to enlarge his means of helping the poor.
He nowise abandoned his conviction that whatever good he sought to do or lent himself to aid must be effected entirely by individual influence.He had little faith in societies, regarding them chiefly as a wretched substitute, just better than nothing, for that help which the neighbour is to give to his neighbour.Finding how the unbelief of the best of the poor is occasioned by hopelessness in privation, and the sufferings of those dear to them, he was confident that only the personal communion of friendship could make it possible for them to believe in God.Christians must be in the world as He was in the world; and in proportion as the truth radiated from them, the world would be able to believe in Him.Money he saw to be worse than useless, except as a gracious outcome of human feelings and brotherly love.He always insisted that the Saviour healed only those on whom his humanity had laid hold; that he demanded faith of them in order to make them regard him, that so his personal being might enter into their hearts.Healing without faith in its source would have done them harm instead of good--would have been to them a windfall, not a Godsend; at best the gift of magic, even sometimes the power of Satan casting out Satan.But he must not therefore act as if he were the only one who could render this individual aid, or as if men influencing the poor individually could not aid each other in their individual labours.He soon found, I say, that there were things he could not do without help, and Nancy was his first perplexity.From this he was delivered in a wonderful way.
One afternoon he was prowling about Spitalfields, where he had made many acquaintances amongst the silk-weavers and their families.
Hearing a loud voice as he passed down a stair from the visit he had been paying further up the house, he went into the room whence the sound came, for he knew a little of the occupant.He was one De Fleuri, or as the neighbours called him, Diffleery, in whose countenance, after generations of want and debasement, the delicate lines and noble cast of his ancient race were yet emergent.This man had lost his wife and three children, his whole family except a daughter now sick, by a slow-consuming hunger; and he did not believe there was a God that ruled in the earth.But he supported his unbelief by no other argument than a hopeless bitter glance at his empty loom.At this moment he sat silent--a rock against which the noisy waves of a combative Bible-reader were breaking in rude foam.His silence and apparent impassiveness angered the irreverent little worthy.To Falconer's humour he looked a vulgar bull-terrier barking at a noble, sad-faced staghound.His foolish arguments against infidelity, drawn from Paley's Natural Theology, and tracts about the inspiration of the Bible, touched the sore-hearted unbelief of the man no nearer than the clangour of negro kettles affects the eclipse of the sun.Falconer stood watching his opportunity.Nor was the eager disputant long in affording him one.
Socratic fashion, Falconer asked him a question, and was answered;followed it with another, which, after a little hesitation, was likewise answered; then asked a third, the ready answer to which involved such a flagrant contradiction of the first, that the poor sorrowful weaver burst into a laugh of delight at the discomfiture of his tormentor.After some stammering, and a confused attempt to recover the line of argument, the would-be partizan of Deity roared out, 'The fool hath said in his heart there is no God;' and with this triumphant discharge of his swivel, turned and ran down the stairs precipitately.
Both laughed while the sound of his footsteps lasted.Then Falconer said,'My.De Fleuri, I believe in God with all my heart, and soul, and strength, and mind; though not in that poor creature's arguments.Idon't know that your unbelief is not better than his faith.'
'I am greatly obliged to you, Mr.Falconer.I haven't laughed so for years.What right has he to come pestering me?'
'None whatever.But you must forgive him, because he is well-meaning, and because his conceit has made a fool of him.
They're not all like him.But how is your daughter?'
'Very poorly, sir.She's going after the rest.A Spitalfields weaver ought to be like the cats: they don't mind how many of their kittens are drowned.'
'I beg your pardon.They don't like it.Only they forget it sooner than we do.'
'Why do you say we, sir? You don't know anything of that sort.'
'The heart knows its own bitterness, De Fleuri--and finds it enough, I dare say.'
The weaver was silent for a moment.When he spoke again, there was a touch of tenderness in his respect.
'Will you go and see my poor Katey, sir?'
'Would she like to see me?'
'It does her good to see you.I never let that fellow go near her.